Pro Commerce

Nazi's were anti-commerce

Sometimes I need to write a blog so that I can reference an article in the future.  Google really isn't that great; neither are the other search engines.  I often lose an article into the irretrievable past even when I know the author and the subject.

My own blogs are generally easy to Google, but not always.

I want to remember and reference this article by Bruce Walker who puts together a great deal of evidence that the Nazis were Left wing socialists.

I have often pointed out to Lefty friends that Nazi is an acronym derived from the German for National Socialist Workers Party.  But since the Nazis were strongly anti-communist they are commonly given a right-wing association.  That detail makes no sense. The Left is always fighting. The Left always hated and killed other Lefties, just like the Nazis did.  That was the case of the  Lefty Bolsheviks versus the Lefty  Menshiviks, the Lefty Trotskyites versus the Lefty Stalinists and the Stalinists versus everyone else.

The most tell tail element that says the Nazi's were socialists and Lefties is their hatred of Jews.  People who hate Jews always hate commerce.  The Nazis railed against banking, interest, profit and oppression of the working class in addition to blaming all social evil on the 'money grubbing capitalist Jews'.

Bruce Walker just gets started on this subject.  We have decades of re-education ahead of us before most intelligent people know that the Nazis were anti-commerce Lefties.

Lefty Ku Klux Klan

Jeffrey Toobin was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  Well educated, well traveled, from a well-to-do Upper West-side Manhattan Jewish family who encouraged Jeffrey's intellectual sophistication from birth....Jeffrey is only lacking in one thing: a moral spine.

Jeffrey joins a parade of sophisticated Lefty intellectuals hired as hit-men.  Garrison Keillor wrote a book review for the N.Y. Times ridiculing one of France's leading contemporary thinkers, Bernard Henri Levy.  Keillor was the pigeon crap-bombing the elephant. Tony Judt was hired to write the hit piece against the very existence of Israel for the New York Review of Books. Judt was hired to make anti-Semitism the sophisticated sine qua non of the N.Y.Review of Books.  Now the New Yorker has hired Jeffrey Toobin to write a hit piece on Clarence Thomas and attack Thomas' brilliant, honest, moving auto-biography My Grandfather's Son.

Toobin has no trouble claiming the Thomas is 'angry' all through the book and for the 15 years since he was put on the Supreme Court.  Toobin claims that Thomas ignores the affirmative action that got him the many jobs that led to the Supreme Court.  Toobin claims that Thomas is hostile to 'elites' who try to tell blacks what to think and how to act, but not to elites who run big business.

Trouble is, Toobin is the last person to be writing a meaningful review of Thomas or his book.  Toobin is a member of the very insidious 'elite' that Thomas holds in contempt. Toobin is an integral part of the Lefty hordes who lynched Thomas at his confirmation hearing and part of the hate filled Left that never stops metaphorically lynching Thomas for being black and not toeing the standard Lefty political line.

Start with Toobin's accusation...

Mechanics Library

We have a private library in San Francisco: the Mechanics Institute Library. The Mechanics was started five years after the leading wave of the 1849 gold rush by the technically minded men of that era....most of whom called themselves mechanics. I have been a library member for over 50 years.

I have a horror story to tell you about the Mechanics which always held a fond place in my heart because it was such a comforting place to go....big leather chairs, clean bathrooms and open stacks to browse.

In the mid-1990s a couple of the top staff members came to me and asked for my help.  Why the staff picked me, I don't know.  They were after-all librarians and must have done their homework.

The story they told was horrific.  The executive director of the Mechanics Library was stealing money on a large scale and the staff was distraught.  The executive director had three ways to steal money. First she would invite the three antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco to search through the stored books to find the valuable ones. The valuable stored books they found were taken to sell with Louise, the executive director, getting a large cut. Louise would mark the books as sold out of outmoded inventory for trivial amounts of money. Second she would sequester donated collections in boxes in her office and invite the same antiquarian booksellers to scour the books for choice items that were marketable and split the profits with her.  The remainder of the donated collections would be recorded as donated books.  Lastly Louise would skim 25% off the daily cash box of fines and copier fees.  The last was small but was immediately noticeable in the recorded data when Louise was on vacation.

I proposed to the staff that I go with the lead staff member to a prominent and respected attorney who had previously been on the Board of the Mechanics Library and explain the situation to him.  He listened carefully, understood the situation and agreed to go to the Board and ask for a confidential personnel meeting.  The lawyer proposed that staff members be allowed to testify secretly to a personnel committee of the Board..

The Board heard the proposal and rejected it.  The Board was totally controlled by Louise.

That left me one option, to run a group of Library members for the Board.  With the staff giving me surreptitious  access to the membership lists, which were not otherwise available, I was able to run a solid campaign of proposed new board members for the Board.

The Board fought back with a well financed mail and phone campaign and my slate lost.  Nearly all the staff left for other library jobs. Louise continued her embezzlement for several more years until she retired early from illness and died shortly there after.

The Mechanics Library Board has never publicly acknowledged its sleazy role in the theft of valuable library property and public irresponsibility.

Multiculturalism

First, what is multiculturalism? It is a term I only find used in academia where it means the cluster of specialized departments of women's or gender studies, African, Latino or ethnic studies and occasionally Middle Eastern Studies.  Multiculturalism never includes cultures that are considered 'high culture' by Euro-centric academics and Lefty students; cultures such as China, India, Tibet or Japan.

Second, where did multiculturalism emerge? It emerged in the mid-1960s when the Black Power and Women's Liberation movements were arriving on the scene.  I saw it first hand in San Francisco as it developed over a decade.  By 1970 the debate had moved into every academic department as the search to expose imperialism, racism and oppression was extended into every academic niche.  The overall issue was debated as the 'battle of the core curriculum', with all white male writers over the past 3,000 years cast as potential villains.

Third, where did it come from? Multiculturalism is the fascinating synthesis of a deeply American premise with a totally alien idea.  The American idea is the immigrant melting pot.  The belief that America is an open society where hard working industrious people, regardless of their 'background or country of origin,' have the opportunity to succeed.  America is premised on our belief in the triumph of merit.  Other societies would not welcome multiculturalism because they don't want to be a melting pot.

The alien idea that has been combined with merit is the concept of the proletariat. The proletariat was a Marxist notion of a large class of people who we would call 'blue collar'; potential union members. The proletariat was to emerge as the source of power and popular will in the communist world.

By the time the multiculturalist synthesis was emerging in the 1960s it was clear from a century of Marxist observation and anticipation, that the proletariat didn't exist. Insofar as labor unions existed in the United States they were weak, they were not growing and they never would. Therefore the Left searched and found in the newly evident Black Power and Women's Liberation movements the 'new version of the proletariat'....the new righteous source of power and popular will that was unfairly oppressed by the 'capitalist' class.

The American value of merit, was turned on its head and we got 'identity politics': blacks and women believing they were oppressed, the victims of patriarchy, racism, imperialism and white class villainy.

The nonsense of multiculturalism as oppressed identity politics, has survived to this day, right where it was first generated...in the hallowed ivy covered fantasy world of academia, the enduring home of rigid Marxist ideology.

There is an interesting and thorough cover article in The Weekly Standard (11/12/2007, Volume 013, Issue 09) by Charlotte Allen on the death of Antioch College at the hands of multiculturalist identity politics.  After a boom period where the idea of multiculturalism was first gaining influence in the curriculum in the late 1970s,  the College saw a long and unremitting slide into death, as students and faculty found the moral imperatives of multiculturalism were alien to American life.  Students stayed away from Antioch, fewer came each year, avoiding four years in the cesspool of multiculturalism.

Wind chimes

The photo on the right is a dead-end street in San Francisco, near my house, that used to be crowded with wind chimes. Four apartments on this street had outdoor wind chimes which were audible to anyone walking by...all the time. Now there are no wind chimes in this area.

I personally find a never ending cacophony of wind chimes to be an intrusion on my personal space. The same would be true for any regular, repetitive or intrusive sounds (except children playing). Fortunately there are none I can hear from my home and when there are I ask the neighbors to take their chimes down.

I always wonder if Real Estate brokers are sensitive to the many potential buyers who might not like to buy a home that is surrounded by wind chimes.

This photo shows an apartment for sale right in the middle of what was formerly the wind chime row. Did the seller understand that many buyers wouldn't like the intrusive wind chime sound and ask the neighbors to take them down?  I suspect that is the case.

For the record, wind chimes came from China where they were put outside the home on calm hot summer evenings where the delicate tinkling of the chimes was a sign of a gentle cooling breeze.  The chimes connoted a cool gentle breeze...a sweet sound. They were never put up any other time.

Who is screwing up?

A family member recently had to put down an elderly beloved dog.  The vet did it quickly and humanely. 

It came to my mind that veterinarians put down thousands of large beloved mammals everyday, ranging from horses to large dogs. Everyone, including the extreme animal rights people, seem to think these veterinary procedures are gentle and kind.

But our legislatures and high court judges have decided that similar methods used on death row inmates, mostly horrible monsters, are cruel and unusual punishment.

So why don't we have veterinaries handle death row procedures or at least train people to use veterinary techniques?

West Africa in San Francisco

The photo on the right is a bumper sticker on a car that says: "Don't believe everything you think."

I believe this is an idea that is derived from a bumper sticker I drove around San Francisco in the early 1990s.  My bumper sticker said "Its not what you think"

My bumper sticker came from signs I saw in West Africa.  I interpreted the signs to mean something close to the Buddhist view that your mind creates a view of the world that is quite distinct from the world we live in.

The other bumper sticker phrase I got from West Africa was: "Nobody knows tomorrow."

Stable government

One of the wonders of the American government has been a willingness to improvise.  The Founding Fathers believed that they had built a system of checks and balances that would protect the republic against the hysteria and occasional obsessions they knew about from classic democracies.

One check and balance that was not foreseen was the addition of many states that duplicated the vast demographic differences found in the original thirteen states.  The original thirteen states were all agrarian but had significant differences in wealth (the Carolina's and Virginia were rich) and population (Massachusetts compared to Rhode Island). 

The original differences were not nearly as great as California , New York and Texas today, compared to the northern mid-western buffalo states.

Five amazing improvisations that make our Congress even more resistant to popular swings in sentiment were the filibuster, the American habit of mixing the parties, the direct election of Senators, the end of committee seniority and the Political Action Committee.  The filibuster, which was invented early but only found common usage in the second third of the the 20th Century, has made sure that only a super-majority consensus on any issue will result in legislation.

The filibuster works particularly well when the Congress and the Executive come from different parties, as has been the case for much of the past sixty years, a habit that is now well ingrained in the American voter's psyche.

The direct election of Senators (a constitutional amendment) did a great deal to make Senators more responsive to the voters of their state and less to the corrupt local party machines.

The end of seniority as the determinant of committee chairmanships reduced the power of agrarian-one-party states significantly and led to greater balance of national interests.

The Political Action Committee, duly modified by the FTC in the early 1980s, created an open financing anti-corruption system system that has given much more credibility to the Congress and to the acceptability of powerful lobbies. Visible powerful lobbies are more effective in halting out of control legislation.

A little more improvisation is obviously needed on the subject to budget earmarks.  But we'll get it sooner rather than later.

Politics may be insignificant

The more I mull over the issue of the modern commercial world being so expansive, so exciting, so rewarding, so challenging and offering so many enjoyable ways of living.....the more I wonder if there is any future for politics and the world of politicians.

The question keeps coming to my mind: "Why would any competent, interesting and curious person choose the world of politics over the world of commerce?"

In San Francisco the answer is clear.  The political world is filled with inadequate, sub-competent people.  I was active in politics for nearly eight years and I rarely met an interesting, competent or intelligent person.  I've kept a finger in politics for another thirty years and have never been disabused of my earlier experience. I've known, well, dozens of political leaders. I can name the two or three exceptions to the 'boob' rule. Those exceptions left politics very quickly for the real world of commerce.

My guess is that politics will be seen more and more as theater, while the few valuable legislative-power brokering functions politics plays will continue to be carried out by the few competent people in the background.

Thanksgiving for private property

After the pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Colony they promptly set-up a Christian commune with all work and product shared equally among the 47 individuals who survived from among the 102 who left England. It was intended as pure communism.  Three years later, everyone agreed that the communal project had failed.  The land was divided up and private property was established.

This is how William Bradford described it: "All this while (every year over the previous three years) no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other thing to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

"The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them."

Need to fabricate

There appears to be a Lefty need to fabricate.   First we had Janet Cooke a rising star fabricating on a regular basis for the Washington Post. Then it was Jayson Blair, another rising star, doing the same for the New York Times.  Steven Glass, the up and coming genius, wrote regularly fabricated articles for the New Republic.  The New Republic never learned and recently added to its pathetic history of fabrication with Scott Thomas Beauchamp reporting from Iraq.

Has anyone asked why the Left is so vulnerable to fabricated articles.  No.

I think the explanation is straight forward: a) the Left lives inside an ideological bottle where all perception of the world is deduced from a few simple catechisms such as evil global corporations and class warfare. Therefore it is easy to fabricate articles by simply applying the catechism to a subject the reporter wants to write about.  "Easy to make up stories" is too great a temptation for many Lefty journalists.

b) The whole Lefty world was demolished in the 20th Century by empirical evidence.  Communism, socialism and government social engineering doesn't work based on evidence from an entire century. Therefore "fabricating stories" is the only way to respond to a world around us that is empirically out of sync with Lefty ideology.

The Left has a future of more journalistic fabrication because the Lefty-world has no alternative. The empiric world we live in doesn't fit Lefty ideology.

The only way Hugo Chavez, BBC, Hamas, France Channel 2 and the Taliban can score positive news stories in the world is by fabricating them.

Cartoons

This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a last -page article on the declining space that newspapers allocate for comics.

The writer, Joanne Kaufman, neglects the most important part of the story.  Most newspapers are fossil organizations with no capability for making changes that the variety of new media demand.  While nearly every  daily newspaper in the U.S. is declining, nationally based U.S.A Today is growing and the Anschutz’ network of daily free Examiner’s are growing rapidly and are profitable.

One interesting point is that the S.F. Examiner, one of the network, has dropped comics altogether.  I guess comics are irrelevant to the people who read newspapers quickly for the local news and back up their reading with the Internet and car radio.

Further apology about school integration

I've publicly apologized for my role in public school integration.  I was wrong to support racial integration but I didn't know what an alternative was at the time.

Now I realize that public school racial integration was a bigger disaster than I thought.  In openly discussing my apology I have learned from five reliable close friends and family members who were in integrated schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Sacramento that the situation was horrific, much worse than has ever been publicly disclosed. Not only did racial integration chase out whites, lower the educational standards and failed the primary goal of integrating neighborhoods...but the non-black kids who remained in the schools were treated viciously.

The presence of a large number of black kids in the public schools meant (and still means) that non-black boys and girls were (and are) constantly threatened with the loss of their lives, mugged, beat up and incessantly abused.  The data is tangible and shocking.

This situation is unacceptable, disgraceful...a harsh tear in the social fabric and a social blight that is intolerable. It was and it is.

Changing my mind

When I see the president of Harvard and the Nobel Laureate head of Cold Spring Harbor Labs both fired for suggesting that genes may play a role in mental capacity, I am forced to realize this may be a taboo subject where the majority is wrong.

I have long assumed that mental capacities and emotional dispositions were too complex and malleable to be genetically generated.

I am now changing my mind.  For two reasons.

One is that by substituting the human term "ethnicity" for the unacceptable terms "race" and "breed" the matter takes on a different quality. Different ethnic groups have significantly different physical morphology.  Nearly all Japanese women have small breast relative to their close neighbors the Koreans. Epicanthic folds are found in many populations out of central Asia and so is a red birth mark on the lower back. Hair qualities vary greatly over the Indian sub-Continent and so-called aboriginals have a number of distinct physical attributes unique to their ethnic regions.

We do have visibly distinct ethnic groups and we don't really know why.  I've tried to find out the minimum human tribal group that can generate a new visible ethnic attribute and how many generations are required for the whole tribe to evidence the trait.  I can't find out.  We don't know.

Therefore genetic evolution of ethnic attributes could be a short period, maybe less than 10 generations.  If visible ethnic variations are possible in historic time, then so could ethnic variations in mental capacity and emotional disposition.

Two, is that it is clear to me, from experience with my grand-children, to see that mental capacity and emotional disposition does vary with the individual and is evident within the first year of life.  Therefore both could readily be genetically associated.

This is a taboo subject because we have an underlying notion of superiority and inferiority of mental and emotional attributes that we don't want attached to ethnicity.  As most people who mistakenly touch this third rail say, and I say " differences don't mean rankings."

America won

America won the war in Iraq.  The following table is rather hard to ignore:

Commerce and democracy

I have been struggling for several years with the issue of Singapore and China.  Both nations have a single party government with limited political free speech. Yet both have a thriving commercial world. Singapore has nearly forty years of success in doing both commerce and politically restrictive governance, with no apparent conflict.

The prevailing wisdom is that the expansion of commerce will generate a free speech governance system.

The closest I can come to making the argument that commerce will generate a free speech governance system is that commerce creates a meritocracy and commerce is a permanent form of social perturbation.

Both the rise of a meritocracy and permanent socio/economic upheaval could threaten a non-free speech governance system.

But that is not necessarily the case. (1) China's classic mandarin government was meritocratic and could therefore be a reasonable source of government control of the commercial world.  (2) Japan and many European governments are efficient and meritocratic. (3) Any nation that had free emigration has a mechanism for getting rid of political troublemakers.

And lastly, a point I get from friend Alex G. (4) an expansive commercial world may offer so many work and lifestyle opportunities that few people would notice the absence of free speech.

What do you think?

What is more maddening

What is more maddening, reading a headline in the mainstream press (AP) that you know is lying or finding out from the Internet how really wrong the mainstream press is?

In some strange way, I am sympathetic to Lolita C. Baldur, the woman who wrote the nationally syndicated Associated Press lie.  She is in a profession that is failing, jobs are evaporating rapidly because newspapers are run by incompetent boobs and the pro-socialist credentials that most journalists carry are becoming more embarrassing everyday.

Here is what Lolita said: "...the number of Army deserters this year (is) showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003."  I know that a rise from 5% to 9% would be an 80% increase...that is the kind of small number mumbo-jumbo the press publishes twice a day.

That is not the case with Lolita's and the AP's lie.  Remember a lie is the intent to deceive.  Lolita and the AP are lying on a big scale.

The desertion rate in 1944 during WWII was 6.5%.  During Korea its was 2.2% and during the Vietnam War the desertion rate climbed again to 5.2%.  In the Iraq War, as any honest person would figure with a volunteer army, the desertion rate is less that one percent, less than 1%.

The AP turned this trivial 1% number into a national tragedy. To do that, Lolita C. Baldur had to lie and AP had to join her in the lie.  The 2007 data shows .9% of soldiers deserted, that is nine-tenths of one percent.   Nine-tenths is up from 0.7, seven-tenths of one percent in 2003.  But it is not up from the three years before the Iraq War when the average was the same nine-tenths: 0.9%

So what gets you madder..knowing that the mainstream media are deceptive or learning from the Internet how really deceptive they are?

Popcorn and weight

I'm a strong advocate of Weight Watchers since it worked for me and my partner.  It also fits in with the empirical evidence that makes sense to me.  I've stated in this blog, many times, that every demographic group, but one, has gained weight in the past two decades.  The only demographic group that hasn't gained weight are the yuppies.

Empirical evidence now explains the yuppie and the Weight Watcher phenomenon. Social networks and social support are the restraining variable.
 
Here are the reliable findings: " A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%. If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37%. These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network."

I want to point out for my fellow weight watchers that a great filler upper is popcorn.  Using the popper on this page, the West Bend from Target, and spray butter, one half cup of corn fills a whole bowl and is 2 points.

Ajax vs Comet

These days our local Safeway only carries Comet, the cleanser commonly used for sinks and bathtubs.

Trouble is, Comet is not nearly as good as Ajax.

Just so you know:  Ajax works, Comet doesn't.

New world

For the past fifteen years we have been in the midst of the greatest global economic growth spurt in history... Greater than any human could have ever imagined.

We are in a post socialist world, and military budgets have faded to near insignificance.

The world of global commerce is positive sum. We are now accumulating wealth and capital at a rate that is beyond comprehension and there is no metric in place to give us suitable measures of the net global capital expansion.

My best personal estimate is that global income in U.S. dollars has grown from $28 trillion in constant dollars at the end of the Cold War to $50 trillion today and household wealth has doubled to $100 trillion.

My question is 'Who has a good enough mind and the appropriate skills to understand the exploding reality?'

The S.F. Exploratorium

 The San Francisco Exploratorium was created in the early 1970's by J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother.  I have had two experiences with the Exploratorium that I wish to mention. Both negative.
 
In the late 1970's I donated a Japanese Magic Mirror ( Makyoh) to the Exploatorium. I included translations of Japanese research journal reports on how the mirror worked.  The mirror casts an image on the wall (mine was a standing Shakyamuni Buddha) and it was in focus at any distance, reflecting sunlight.  The Japanese documents I provided reported on a microscopic study of the surface of the mirror and explained that it was an hologram created by trial and error.

I had taken the mirror to a traditional Kyoto craftsman to be polished.  He had spent about an hour, while I watched him, polishing the mercury surface with pear oil and a cloth.

The Exploratorium lost the mirror, when I checked about a year after donating it.  It had cost me about $600 and today would be worth about $6,500 with inflation and the changing value of the yen.

About the same time I made a proposal to the Exploratorium to create a device to measure earth tides.  The same tides that flow around the world twice a day, created by the earth-moon interaction, are visible on the oceans because they can average +/- 3 feet around the mean. On large land surfaces they only measure +/- one foot and are not visible.

The land tidal wave device I proposed was a laser set up 8 miles away from the Exploratorium that was focused on a mirror that reflected inside a dark chamber in the Exploratorium and recorded the wave motion on a photo sensitive paper. 

The staff had no interest in the idea.  To this day I've never seen any device that shows people the land wave that travels under our feet and our houses twice a day.

Consistent with the low level of scientific competence and integrity of the Exploratorium, the current exhibits have plenty about the non-existent man made global warming hysteria. But the Exploratorium doesn't understand that it is hysteria.

Carry trade

If you follow the stock market, or like me, you believe that international diversification is rational, you and I both have been in for a rude shock in the past four months.  Every market in the world, from Singapore to Stockholm has been moving in sync hour by hour and day by day.  There is no haven from the volatility.

I have no idea what is causing the volatility, (+/- 7% to 12% a week), nor why all the global markets are moving in sync

There is a phenomenon that is of interest.  The Yen relative to the Dollar is moving in the same pattern as the market on a weekly basis.  The Yen connection to the global market is understandable because of the carry trade.  The 'carry trade' is the practice of very large players (governments, pensions, international funds) of borrowing money in Japan at interest rates below 2% and investing at higher  rates in other country's bonds.  Since the money is borrowed, the net yield can be very large.  However, the currency risk is also very large.

With the carry trade, a global fund can borrow $200 billion in Japan at 1.5% invest in Spanish bonds at 6% and only have to use 10% of the global fund's money as security for the loan.  That gives a yield of 45% in a year.  However, if the Yen falls relative to the Euro, money will be moved back to Japan to reduce the size of the loan. Big money is moving because of the carry trade.

Big money is flowing around the globe minute by minute, probably a lot is borrowed.  What is this money paying attention to?

The next productivity burst

I regularly speculate on the source of the great American productivity burst that fueled the longest growth period in America from 1989 to 2000 and then again from 2001 to today. My thinking about productivity is based on my intimate connection with hundreds and hundreds of businesses of all sizes.

For the earlier period I am comfortable explaining productivity growth based on FedEx, UPS, telephone answering machines, email, Starbucks, laptop computers, international fiber-optic cables, Microsoft Office, and web browsers. For the second period I lean toward ubiquitous cell phones, leveraged buyouts and Google.

Looking at the immediate future the most important source of productivity I see are Internet social networks.  In the Bay Area there is Linkedin and for the U.S. there is Facebook.

Why? Two reasons: First, all important commercial life is built around social networks and any facilitation of this networking reality is productive.  Second, Americans (and Israeli's) are the most socially open, gregarious and friendly people on the planet. So improvements in social networking will re-downed particularly to American business.

Keep your eyes open.  Will we see the GNP and profits continue to climb for the next five years? I think so.

Inside information

I have inside information but no insider investments to make for my benefit.  Maybe you can do something with the information.

The Norbertine Order of the Roman Catholic Church is the fastest growing order in the Church.  The order is ancient and also conservative, much like Opus Dei. The membership is growing fast and consequently the new priests are young and eager.  The part of the order I know about is in the U.S.

Deeply religious, conservative, Catholic and growing rapidly with fresh new young male faces.  That is inside information.

The Democrats have found an answer

I heard the Democrats' answer to the fact that America has won the war in Iraq. One of the brighter ones whined yesterday "that means the soldiers will be coming home soon with post traumatic stress to kill hundreds of innocent Americans and many of them will have drug addictions that will add to our homeless problem."

I'm not kidding you.  The whine was framed as part of the Bush conspiracy against America.  Never mind that our soldiers are all volunteers and great specimens of competence and patriotism.

S.F. Muni public transportation

The San Francisco public transit system, called Muni, is in bad shape and can not get better.  We have a mayor who is politically and managerially incompetent.  He will be in office for another four years. The system is run by our incompetent and corrupt labor unions.

Take a look at this page that is intended to collect letters of outrage.  Virtually none.  Why?

The answer is what I learned in Tokyo years ago.  Tokyo has a perfect transport system.  It is on-time always.  What makes it perfect is that all the schedules are accurate.

Now San Francisco, with a miserable system, can meet the expectations of a perfect system.  The way it works is that nearly all bus shelters have electronic signs (see photo on the right) that tell when the next bus arrives.  There is an online system that provides the same information from Nextbus. com.

A crumby system that lets you know when the next bus is coming is a satisfactory transit system.  When you know the next bus won't come for 7 minutes, you can go to the bathroom, go shopping, go to another bus, go shopping or walk.  Knowing the time gives you choice and that is what a free market is all about.  The information, gives us a relatively free market. 

We will take perfect knowledge about a faulty system anyday over a better, but still less than perfect system.  And we do, thank goodness.

Hot finding

I can't resist mentioning the news item about John Kanzius and putting a link to the youtube site.  He was working on a device to help brain cells revive after a blood clot episode using radio waves and found that his brain radio frequency also breaks apart ocean water molecules releasing hydrogen and oxygen to create burning water.

I love Kanzius in the video.  He is nonchalant...shows modest interest in what he has discovered.  In any case, if the discovery is patentable, his youtube video establishes his first use.

Journalists

I am baffled about journalists. The question for me is not why are journalists so overwhelmingly Lefties unable to view the world with open eyes.  They are almost a doppelganger for academics.   My question is "Who decides to become a journalist?"

Academics are predominantly people who were rewarded as children for succeeding in the classroom and failures at human relations on the playground. That I know.

Therefore, I would guess that journalists are a subset of academics who did well in writing, possibly loved sports (as observers), were not the top in their class but were also failures on the playground.

My sample is small but my source is the best: Robert Novak who was the top insider journalist for forty years in Washington. (Prince of Darkness) He found that the journalists he knew reported positively on politicians who coddled them and until the 1990s drank booze with them regularly.  Journalists seemed to want to be friends with the people they reported on regularly, more than anything.  Journalists only focused on the immediate moment and being in good graces with the people who liked them or pretended to like them.

Sounds like the childhood playground to me.  Sounds like journalists were failures in ordinary human relations just like academics.

Celebrate Hatar

You missed a great celebration in Oakland.  The Eritrean Orthodox Church celebrated the beginning of the month of Hatar today.  The celebration began at 3AM and continued for twelve hours of dancing, singing and some prayer.  It ended with a lavish Eritrean meal and honey wine (maybe honey beer).

The church has 200 active members and that is what would normally fit in the space.  Today all the friends and family of members came from the entire Bay Area and numbered 7-800.  It was crowded and the overflow was in a tent adjacent to the church. Yes, there are many beautiful people.

The language had a Semitic glottal ayan. The esthetics seem very ancient and the applause mixes with the Middle Eastern ululation. The man in the black hat on the right is the Bishop of the church who travels with 10 associates and lives in D.C.

Verified

We live in a world where the issues of technology are constantly challenged.  That makes sense when the technologies are new, untried and still in dispute.  But I don't believe we have a deep gut sense of how solid the creations of past technology have been and how far they have taken us and our lives.  Most people have no sense of how informed we are by technology.

Thinking back on the space program that landed humans on the moon, sent satellites to orbit Mars and cameras past Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, we may not have appreciated what that technology proved.

We have proved, with the space program, that Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were correct in their description of the world.  We have proved every important mathematical structure from calculus to linear algebra and infinite sets. We have proved nearly every step of the technological ladder over the past four hundred years, with the launches of our rockets.  Technology is a ladder, we are standing on the top rungs of thousand of ladders that converge to send and receive an electronic signal from an object many times more distant than the sun.

When someone says that signals from their microwave, high power transmission lines and cell phone cause cancer, they don't have any deep gut understanding of the world that technology has brought us and why we know what we do know.

Fortunate

I went to the 9/11neocon "connect-up" last month.  Since then I have been thinking about how fortunate I've been in my life. 

When I was born and well into my high school years there was only one world that anyone imagined: a socialist world. That vision became shakier and shakier throughout my life and finally it has been replaced. I went to a Kibbutz after college (Recent photo on right). With that experience, a job in a Soviet style union shop and the help of George Orwell's Animal Farm I got rid of any personal socialist inclinations.  But the world around me didn't begin to change for decades.

I lived from the beginning to the end of the Cold War. I was terrified of nuclear war in the 1950s when people I knew were building bomb shelters.  I was in the Army and was called to active duty during the Cuban and Berlin crises. I personally knew many important Cold War figures including Richard Nixon and Cap Weinberger. I was in the USSR at the peak of the Cold War hostilities in 1982 and walked the streets of Leningrad and Moscow. I went to Berlin, Prague and Budapest immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  I've since been to Havana and seen the havoc of a forty year communist reign of tyranny.

I was also deeply involved in the greatest voluntary human experiment in history, the Hippy Era.  I was at the center of the hippy storm; on the Board of the Whole Earth Catalog, president of the Point Foundation, Business Manager of Glide Church, founder of the Briarpatch Network, friend of nearly everyone in the Hippy milieu and especially close to the mother of all hippies, Salli Rasberry.  I enjoyed the full sexual freedom of the era and was an active participant in the National Sex and Drug Forum films and trainings.

In the early 1960s I saw the end of class in America and the rise of merit.  No other society in history has gotten rid of class, without a peep, without any self consciousness about the achievement.

At the same time, with the Papal Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, I saw anti-Semitism in America drop to the lowest level it has ever been in any society. 

Now I have been surrounded by people who can hear the Second Voice...the world of Pro Commerce.  I get to read the Weekly Standard, Azure, The Claremont Review of Books, Commentary and dozens of brilliant writers from Jonathan Israel to Michael Oren.

I am indeed fortunate.